| Kambaata | |
|---|---|
| Kambaatissata | |
| Native to | Ethiopia |
| Region | Southwest Gurage, Kambaata, Hadiyya Regions |
| Ethnicity | Kambaata |
Native speakers | 740,000 (2007 census)[1][2] |
| Ethiopic,Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either:ktb – Kambaataalw – Alaba-K’abeena |
| Glottolog | kamb1318 |
Kambaata is aHighland East Cushitic language, part of the largerAfro-Asiatic family and spoken by theKambaata people. Closely relatedvarieties are Xambaaro (T'ambaaro, Timbaaro), Alaba, and Qabeena (K'abeena),[3] of which the latter two are sometimes divided as a separateAlaba language. The language has many verbal affixes. When these are affixed to verbal roots, there are a large amount ofmorphophonemic changes.[4] The language has subject–object–verb order. The phonemes of Kambaata include five vowels (which are distinctively long or short), a set ofejectives, a retroflexedimplosive, and glottal stop.
The New Testament and some parts of the Old Testament have been translated into the Kambaata language. At first, they were published in the Ethiopian syllabary (New Testament in 1992), but later on, they were republished in Latin letters, in conformity with new policies and practices.
Here is the phonology of the Kambaata language.[5]
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive/Affricate | voiceless | t | tʃ | k | ʔ | |
| voiced | b | d | dʒ | g | ||
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | ||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʃ | h | |
| voiced | z | (ʒ) | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | (ɲ) | |||
| Lateral | plain | l | ||||
| glottalized | lˀ | |||||
| Trill | plain | r | ||||
| glottalized | rˀ | |||||
| Semivowel | w | j | ||||
Kambaata has a simple five vowel system/a,e,i,o,u/, contrastinglong vowels andnasalized vowels (but only marginally).[5]
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